Talk:Battleships/@comment-26915086-20180917234312
If I had to pin down my greatest strengths and weaknesses as a designer, I would say speed and durability are my strongest suits, and aesthetics and creativity are my weakest. For my SCR types, I have had great success marrying speed and durability, with ships like the Dyasdera class possessing pseudo-battleship level durability and a solid speed of 60kts. The types of armors used on my SCRs are very advanced, having been brought through the crucible of testing and perpetual failure. Fortunately, there have been 21 different commissioned SCRs with each having a lengthy armor test period. This means I have had many iterations to perfect the ideal armor schemes, hull forms, and armament layouts for medium ships. Unfortunately, the number of true battleship types is far more limited. As of now I have designed only 14 battleship types post Huntsman. Protecting a battleship is very different than protecting an SCR, for one, a battleship is a bigger target, and has more places to protect from shell fire, it is also more likely to fight at long range, meaning belt armor is less important and deck armor more important. There is a further complication when considering SBB types, of which I have only a single commissioned example. The SBB needs to reach 60kts with a heavier and therefore draggier hull. As this is a scout '''battleship, '''not a battlecruiser, it still needs battleship grade protection, however now you are far more strapped for tonnage to achieve this, particularly if you want big guns. With that established, it is easy to see how the task of getting a battleship to run with the SCRs is not an easy one. NCS. Traveler SBB-1 was the first ship commissioned to pull this off, doing so at the cost of armaments, only packing 12 38cm guns, compared to the 12 40cm guns of Perseus or 12 46cm guns of Andromeda, but after this achievement, I have been hard pressed to design a capable SBB. SBB-2 was a learning experiment, armed with 36cm guns she was meant to take the traveler design and miniaturize it, allowing for the better developed SCR armor schemes to be employed. Unfortunately, SCR armor is not very good when upscaled to even a small battleship, so the result was not very durable. This brings us to the newest battleship in the navy, SBB-3, the Intrepid class. The Intrepid class represents the culmination of several ideas I’ve been kicking around for a while but have not been able to pull off. One of these is something Ebola mentioned in a troll post a while back which stuck with me. He spoke about the most powerful armor, one which completely negated all types of damage and which was also indestructible. Of course, he was talking about water, but it got me thinking. As it turns out near misses do no damage to ships, shells despawn when they hit the surface. The implication is simple; no shell will ever hit a ship below the waterline. So why not just put all your armor above the water? Well unfortunately moving mass higher on the ship has a negative effect on stability, often meaning a ship will be better served by armor lower in the ship even if it will never take a hit because protection is a moot point if the ship capsizes. With type 1 of 2 hull forms, I would never be able to manage this trick. But what if I had a significantly more stable hull form? Enter the type 3: pioneered on SCRs, and finally tested on a battleship. This, along with a more capable deck armor scheme, allows for the ship to be far better protected than contemporaries per ton of armor. (again, we are working on a tonnage budget here) The other major step up was in terms of firepower. Intrepid is armed with 9, 46cm guns, meaning she can outrange any ship with a smaller gun. The 700mj CE score of the 46 gives her a lethal punch at range, 6300 total CE per salvo. This is compared to 12 38cm guns on Traveler, which output 4080 total CE in a salvo. Even factoring the secondary, Traveler outputs 5280 CE, 1020 CE less than the newer ship. Unfortunately, the design was too tight on weight to add a major secondary to Intrepid, so she needs to rely on the big guns to do her killing. This makes her better than Traveler against heavy ships, packing more CE, and capable of greater range, but against smaller ships, or more numerous threats, Traveler has the edge, with 12 primary and 6 secondary guns, all of which can fire past 20km. I was thinking about making her far longer to take advantage of the guns aiming independently, however, it would make her a bigger, target with more to protect, so instead I went with a stouter form allowing the very durable 46cm guns to provide some extra protection. Overall the result is a bit stubbier than previous designs, giving her the look of a standard type battleship of the interwar US Navy. I’ll probably never be 100% happy with the superstructure design, however I think it looks sharp enough. The reason to run this ship is the combination of speed, firepower, and protection, as in any one of these categories there are better ships, heck there are better ships in my navy. Together however, the Intrepid class is unmatched.